Ice Hockey at Seven Peaks Ice Arena

Hi all.  Yesterday I invited myself to a hockey game that my daughter's-boyfriend's-friend plays in. It is a C-league team called the Mudds.  As you can probably tell I am trying to learn about shooting video and want to try and get better at it.  I decided to once again shoot with the 5D Mark III, Magic Lantern Raw (of course) and the Canon 70-200 F2.8 L II lens.  I gotta say, this lens never ceases to amaze.  The stabilization that the lens has makes it really great for video.

So here is what I learned.  Following a puck and keeping everything in focus is hard to do... and I thought football was hard!  I started out really getting up-close and personal with the zoom, mostly keeping everything at F2.8 and ISO 100.  I ended up, near the end of the game, shooting at F8 and ISO 1600 and keeping the zoom to a minimum.  Oh, I also ended up mounting a GoPro Hero 3 above the goal to catch the action.  I shot it at 1080P, 48fps, Spot metering: Off, Protune On.  This is because when I merge the footage of GoPro and the Canon it looks much better to have matching frame rates.  I know that people will tell you that Adobe Premiere can handle different frame rates, and it can, it just ends up skipping frames.  For me, this ends up looking jerky and not good.  The 48fps makes it so I can slow the action down for those really cool instant replay action shots.

I also asked the people running the place if I might be able to fly the quadcopter above a game.  They said "maybe... let me get back to you", so at least it wan't an outright "no".  I think I would have to have FPV googles to pull it off though.  It would be fairly hard to follow the action without seeing what the camera is seeing.

Here is the video.



I also took some stills.  Stills are what this camera is really meant to be able to do.  And it truly does!

 Gooooooooaaaaaaaalllll

Pads, who needs pads. 

 You talking to me?

Nice save